Sunday, June 26, 2011

Die Grüne Bierhalle

THERE are many amusing things about the climate change movement, from adherents’ inclination to fret about hermaphrodism in water fleas to the increasingly desperate efforts of its Australian operatives to persuade fellow citizens that higher taxes are a source of much pride, great joy and no pain. Advanced by advocates who earn too little to be of interest to the ATO or, more often, by those who can afford the services of sharp accountants, that proposition has proven so difficult to sell that any distraction from the ruptured narrative is these days welcomed by warmists with open arms. A week or two back, the sideshow du jour were those death threats that weren’t. Now, the dogs having barked, the catastrophist caravan has moved on to the next illusory oasis, which this week happens to be the visiting Viscount Monckton’s observation that many alarmists would have felt very much at home in a Munich beer hall, circa 1922 or so.

The Silly, as you would expect of an organisation staffed by quality journalists, has been particularly active over the past few days in dismissing Monckton as a nutter. Indeed, Jacqueline Maley – whose thin-lipped mugshot suggests either bad teeth or a gridlocked bowel -- was at it again on Saturday morning.

During a speech in the US, he exhibited projector slides of the Nazi flag, possibly even using one of those laser pointery things to emphasise his case — which was that Professor Ross Garnaut, the government's key climate change adviser, is akin to a Nazi.

He even chucked in a German accent and an hilarious "Heil Hitler" to bring the point home.

Making her omission doubly curious is the snatch of audio preceding the web version of Maley’s little article – an unfiltered, unquestioned PM asserting that, when she said there would be no carbon tax, that pledge was not at odds with her post-election drive to introduce one.

Of Monckton’s speech, however, not a direct quotation nor link. Doubling the mystery is the fact that the speech, all 60 minutes-or-so of it, is readily available, as a curious taxpayer or even a non-quality journalist might have discovered with minimal effort. Click here to view the presentation and, if you are late for a dental appointment or an assignation with a high colonic irrigator, skip to the 50-minute mark for the comments and slide show at the centre of all the fuss.

Just to set things up, Monckton begins the sequence with a quote from the Austrian Corporal’s Mein Kampf: “There will be no body of representatives which makes its decisions through majority vote.” After that comes a selection of authoritarian reveries from various greenshirts, Garnaut amongst them, starting with a statement from something called the Scientific Advisory Council on Global Environmental Change. Perhaps appropriately, it is a German panel and it has been blitzing Chancellor Angela Merkel with some unsettling suggestions, amongst them:

The people must accept the absolute pre-eminence of sustainability and must surrender their own wishes. The guarantor of this virtual contract is the directing State.*

The next Monckton quote is sourced to the University of Adelaide’s Professor David Shearman, who has also advised the IPCC:

Specially trained philosopher-ecologists will either rule themselves or advise an authoritarian government of policies based on their ecological training and philosophical sensitivities.

Those interested in Shearman’s deeper thoughts about what is good for the shallow rest of us can find more on page 134 of his book, The Climate Change Challenge And The Failure Of Democracy. If that whets your appetite, also see this post at Haunting The Library, where there is a further exploration of Shearman’s hope that a cadre of “eco-warriors” will be raised and indoctrinated from childhood to lead the crusade against the carbon curse. This will be needed, apparently, because humanity is an “eco-tumour” best excised by some ebola-type virus capable of carrying off 90% of us. Almost as distressing, as Haunting The Library reports, is the fact that Shearman’s co-authored book was underwritten in part by “the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia.”

As his penultimate quote, Monckton finally gets to the Garnaut utterance, the one that set Maley to such a fit of chortling:

The outsider to climate science has no rational choice but to accept that, on a balance of probabilities, the mainstream science is right in pointing to high risks from unmitigated climate change.

Monckton then notes how Garnaut’s view is an affirmation of the view that little people must “accept authority without question, which is a fascist point of view.”

*NOTE: Linguists might quibble about Monckton’s translation, but it seems a fair rendering of the relevant passage, found at the foot of the right column on page eight of the Council’s report, released in March, 2011.